biochemistry
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Liz O’Day Put Science on a T-Shirt. Then She Put It on a Deadline.
Before Olaris, Liz O’Day stored science-themed shirts in her kitchen and quietly wondered whether she counted as an entrepreneur. Twelve years into building a diagnostics company, the answer lives in her habit of turning difficult questions into things people can actually use.
Elizabeth Jaworski Is Building Her Second Company Around the Muscle Everyone Forgets
A biochemist, a private pilot and a repeat founder, Ela Jaworski has spent her career crossing the awkward distance between a promising experiment and a product people can actually use.
David Kuraguntla Built Alio by Learning When to Leave the First Idea Behind
A planned surgical career became a decade-long lesson in risk, reinvention and patient-centered product design. The result is Alio - and a founder’s playbook built around fast decisions, aligned incentives and the discipline to change course.
Alta Resource Technologies
Alta Resource Technologies is a Boulder, Colorado deep-tech startup using engineered proteins to selectively separate rare earth elements and other critical minerals from low-grade ores, mining tailings, and electronic waste. Its 'precision mining' platform, licensed from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and co-developed with Pennsylvania State University, binds individual metals with high selectivity, aiming to cut the cost and environmental damage of conventional chemical refining while helping secure a domestic U.S. supply of materials used in EVs, wind turbines, electronics, and defense systems.
Stig Hansen
Stig K. Hansen is a Danish-American biochemist and serial biotech founder who co-founded Kimia Therapeutics in 2023, a Berkeley-based precision chemistry company applying machine learning and automated synthesis to drug discovery. He previously co-founded and led Carmot Therapeutics for 15 years, inventing Chemotype Evolution technology that contributed to LUMAKRAS - the world's first FDA-approved KRAS G12C inhibitor for non-small cell lung cancer. Carmot was acquired by Roche for up to $3.1 billion in January 2024. At Kimia, Hansen is pioneering the ATLAS platform (AcTive Learning with Automated Synthesis and Screening), which integrates high-throughput chemistry, genome editing, and AI to map druggable chemical space at unprecedented scale. The company raised a $55 million Series A in December 2023 led by The Column Group and Dimension.